Synthesis, part of a special feature on The Nature of Peace: Post-Conflict Peacebuilding and its Implications for Environment and Livelihoods

INTRODUCTION

Internal armed conflicts are recurring phenomena in the history of mankind. They frequently cause large numbers of fatalities and lead to devastating social consequences. The linkages of such conflicts to the natural environment are mutual, complex, and take different trajectories. On the one hand, internal armed conflicts may entail both direct environmental destruction and indirect impacts on ecosystems, e.g., through population displacement. Moreover, the natural environment can be a major source of conflict when various groups and militias may battle for access to, and control over, natural resources and lands to enrich themselves and finance their activities. These resources are often overexploited and extracted in an illegal and informal manner, owing to the lack of oversight from a weak or collapsed government (Bernauer et al. 2012).

On the other hand, internal armed conflicts may provide an unintended protection for ecosystems (McNeely 2003, Burgess et al. 2015). Infrastructure construction, extensive agricultural activity, external investments and land-grabbing are severely limited during ongoing hostilities, e.g., in frontline areas or demarcated ceasefire zones (Sanchez-Cuervo and Aide 2013).

In this article we synthesize findings from the international and inter-disciplinary research program the “Nature of Peace”^[1] and further related studies united in this special feature. We do so with the goal to identify, explain, and understand trajectories that environmental peacebuilding processes may take in societies after an intra-state conflict. We follow an understanding of environmental peacebuilding as the integration of environmental considerations into efforts to reduce the risk of relapsing into an internal armed conflict. In light of the intricate connections between peace and environment, the concept of environmental peacebuilding stresses the need for a holistic perspective to both study and create conditions for sustainable peace. In other words, in post-conflict societies environmental protection needs to be an essential and necessary aspect of peacebuilding, and vice versa.

With our findings, we contribute to the sprawling literature on environmental peacebuilding processes, following calls for more inter-disciplinary, multi-dimensional, and theory-guided collaborations in the study of such processes (Carius 2006, Ide 2017, Dresse et al. 2019, Krampe et al. 2021, Ide et al. 2023). Over the past two decades, the complex interlinkage between peace and the environment has drawn increasing attention from researchers from a variety of disciplines (cf. Simangan et al. 2022, Ide et al. 2023). This includes the emergence of a research community on environmental peacebuilding with its own association and recurring conferences.^[2] Likewise, this dynamic has drawn increasing attention in international politics, most notably in the Sustainable Development Goals, which combine the management of natural resources and ecosystems on land (goal no. 15) with poverty eradication (goal no. 1) and the promotion of peace (goal no. 16).

Following recent work on environmental peacebuilding trajectories (Dresse et al. 2019), we developed and applied an analytical framework that scrutinizes crucial aspects or milestones of such trajectories, and the connections between them. This framework includes overarching drivers that are underlying an environmental peacebuilding trajectory as a whole. We focused largely on the effects of two sets of drivers, first, dominant discourses and narratives, and second, constellations of power.

We assumed that these drivers impact the degrees and ways in which ecological concerns are integrated in a peacebuilding process, e.g., in terms of new environmental legislation. In turn, this environmental nature of the peace process, or lack thereof, may cause or reinforce certain environmental consequences, for instance, (avoided) biodiversity loss and deforestation, and social consequences like threatening or protecting the livelihoods of local communities. Finally, the sum, or rather mutual constitution, of these consequences may severely impact the chances for sustainable peace, in terms of the prevention of direct violence and the mitigation of structural and cultural violence. As we lay out in the next section, we translated these different elements of an environmental peacebuilding trajectory, and the relations between them, into a set of research questions that guided the analyses in our research program.

When applying the framework, we put emphasis on two case study areas. First, we focus on Colombia where a peace agreement was signed between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2016, officially terminating an internal armed conflict that had lasted over 50 years (Samper et al. 2024, Krause et al. 2025; Sjöstedt, unpublished manuscript, Valencia et al., unpublished manuscript). Second is Uganda, where a peace agreement was already signed in 2002, although the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has been continuing its activities until present day (Nardi and Kasznar 2025; cf. Nardi et al. 2024). In addition to these two central studies, our team collaborated closely with colleagues in a wider research network whose work is also represented in this special journal feature. Thanks to this collaboration, we could extend our insights into trajectories of environmental peacebuilding toward further geographical contexts, such as Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Puerto Rico, Ethiopia, and the border region between Syria, Turkey, and Iraq (Eklund and Dinc 2024, Magalhães Teixeira and Nicoson 2024, Schulte to Bühne et al. 2024, Verweijen and Hoffmann 2024). Although the purpose of this article is to synthesize these various alleys of research, we refer the reader to the other contributions in this special feature for more detailed answers to the research questions we introduce below.

We show how both constellations of power and dominant narratives have a considerable influence on environmental peacebuilding processes in different geographical contexts. Yet, it is in particular the dominance of nature-neglecting, instrumentalizing, and extractive narratives that has far-reaching impacts on the trajectory of peace processes. This not only has negative environmental consequences, but also wider social impacts and, ultimately, jeopardizes the chance to reach sustainable peace. For instance, when extractivist ambitions and new mining projects are part of peacebuilding efforts, these undermine efforts to mitigate conflicts over resources. More fundamentally, these ambitions reflect a broader discursive lock-in which perpetuates certain forms of social-ecological exploitation and physical and structural violence (cf. McNeish 2017).

In turn, non-exploitative perspectives toward nature in local peace processes may facilitate more sustainable practices because they may support the social empowerment of vulnerable groups and bring about a feeling of sustainable peace across local populations (Nardi et al. 2024). The major lesson that we take from these findings, and our research program in general, is: although addressing strong power asymmetries remains an important step, breaking up nature-instrumentalizing discursive lock-ins is essential to open up new alleys for sustainable peace.

ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK

Rationale and research questions

We follow a broad concept of post-conflict peacebuilding as a range of measures undertaken “on the far side of conflict” (United Nations General Assembly and Security Council 2000:3) by different actors, external and domestic, governmental and non-governmental, to reduce the risk of relapsing into armed conflict and to create conditions for sustainable peace. These measures can be roughly distinguished along three purposes: those stabilizing the post-conflict zone, e.g., disarmament and reintegration programs; those restoring or building state institutions, e.g., technical assistance to support governance functions and the rule of law, or programs to promote the transparency, accountability, and legitimacy of institutions; and those supporting the reconstruction and development of a socioeconomic infrastructure, e.g., trauma counseling, supporting transitional justice, reconciliation and community dialogue, strengthening civil society organizations and vulnerable groups, promoting environmental awareness and gender empowerment (Barnett et al. 2007).

Extending this understanding to environmental aspects of post-conflict peacebuilding offers a unique opportunity to bring ecosystems to the fore, for a double purpose: to ensure their protection, for instance, by introducing or strengthening respective legislation and institutions; and to promote stability and peace through sustainable resource management, the equitable distribution of resulting benefits, and environmental cooperation in general.

However, the dual promise of environmental peacebuilding has rarely been met. The end of the civil war in Cambodia, to name but one example, opened the doors for infrastructure development that entailed a large-scale exploitation of natural resources and forest degradation, to the direct or indirect detriment of people relying on them (Le Billon 2000, Milne et al. 2015). A peace process may hence take different directions, also regarding environmental protection. As several scholars have repeatedly called for, further insights about the different trajectories and connections in environmental peacebuilding are therefore crucial, as is a better understanding of drivers behind the different developments (Ide 2017, Dresse et al. 2019).

Figure 1 summarizes our attempt to draw such connections and identify respective trajectories of environmental peacebuilding processes after intra-state conflicts. The arrows reflect these connections. They assume that dominant narratives and power constellations are underlying peacebuilding processes, that these processes have environmental and social consequences that impact back on them, with implications for sustainable peace. We discuss in detail how these various connections may add up to different trajectories, which lead from certain drivers and considerations of the natural environment to social-ecological developments; and toward sustainable peace or relapse into direct, structural, or cultural violence.

The connections depicted in the figure unfold into a set of research questions that guided our research:

1. Taking stock: To which extent are concerns of environmental protection integrated or neglected in the peacebuilding process after an internal armed conflict?
2. Environmental consequences: How does the post-conflict peacebuilding process impact a country’s or region’s natural environment?
3. Social consequences: Which consequences do the peacebuilding activities and their environmental implications have for the livelihoods of local communities that depend on respective ecosystem services or natural resources?
4. Sustainable Peace (?): How do these various developments feed back into the peacebuilding process and, ultimately, affect its objective of avoiding or mitigating different forms of violence?
5. Drivers: What are the major drivers underlying the integration or neglect of environmental concerns and the trajectories leading to respective environmental, social, and peace-related consequences?
6. Lessons and responses: Which lessons can we draw from these drivers and consequences to safeguard the environment and associated livelihoods in peacebuilding processes and reach sustainable peace?

Unpacking the framework

The first box in Figure 1 refers to two major theory-based fundamental drivers that may underlie the trajectories we observe. With this, we follow Dresse et al. (2019) and their call for more theory-guided analysis of environmental peacebuilding trajectories. These authors identified technical, restorative, and sustainable routes such processes may take and explained them with spill-overs between sectors and policy fields. Building on their work, we employ tenets from major social and political science theories to the study of environmental peacebuilding to analyze potentially deeper root causes for certain trajectories.

In a simplified way, the left box represents two major and very different theoretical traditions. With the first driver of dominant narratives and discourses, we follow interpretivist or subjectivist traditions, in particular tenets from narrative analysis and (critical) discourse analysis (e.g., Fairclough 1992, Bevir and Rhodes 2008, Wagenaar 2011). Based on these, we can expect a low or insufficient integration of environmental protection concerns in a country’s post-conflict peacebuilding process when dominant and longstanding narratives or discourses on the human-nature nexus continue to reproduce exploitative beliefs and practices, with detrimental consequences for ecosystems and livelihoods (cf. Pattberg and Zelli 2016).

What unites terms like narratives and discourses is that they refer to deeper types of context-dependent meanings that shape social or political processes. Wagenaar (2011) defines narrative or story as a meaningful and plausible relation that people make between specific motives and interpretations on the one hand and specific behavior on the other. These narratives do not need to be “true” in the sense of logically or causally robust. Rather, they allow social actors “to make sense of events for which the relation between the parts is not immediately obvious” (Wagenaar 2011:211; cf. Mishler 1995, Zelli et al. 2019).

Narratives are thus necessarily subjective, value-laden, action-oriented, and changeable. They imply a moral positioning toward events, processes, and actors, e.g., when assigning obligations, guilt or responsibilities for an internal armed conflict to a certain group, and when expecting disciplinary measures against that group in the subsequent peacebuilding process. Importantly, Wagenaar (2011) assigns a distinct level of awareness and agency to narratives, i.e., actors that hold and follow a certain narrative are at least partly aware that they are doing so.

Discourse, although related to narrative as another key subjectivist concept, differs from Wagenaar’s understanding of narrative in at least two ways in the theoretical traditions that we follow here. First, discourse is a more comprehensive concept that bundles various types of meaning, e.g., in the sense of a broader neoliberal discourse that motivates and reproduces pivotal aspects of a peacebuilding process. Second, a critical or post-structuralist understanding of discourse implies lower levels of awareness, i.e., actors that hold and follow certain neoliberal logics, or a counter-discourse, may be largely unconscious or not reflective about it (Hajer 1995, Hajer and Wagenaar 2003; cf. Laclau and Mouffe 1985, Foucault 1991, Fairclough 1992). Hajer (2009:60) defines discourse in this sense as an “ensemble of ideas, concepts, notions and categorizations that are produced, reproduced, and transformed in a particular set of practices.”

By using the terms narratives and discourses pragmatically in this article, we account for the broad scope of meanings that may steer human behavior in a peacebuilding process. These may regard the processes as a whole or specific aspects thereof and imply different levels of actors’ awareness about these meanings, their origins, and implications. As we show, we explored certain dominant narratives and discourses as the possible deeper drivers that underlie a key trajectory of environmental peacebuilding we could identify.

In addition to narratives and discourses, we considered constellations of power as a second and arguably more tangible driver of conflict. Following arguments from critical political economists (e.g., Newell 2015, Katz-Rosene and Paterson 2018), post-colonial scholars (e.g., Mount and O’Brien 2013), but also rational-institutionalist scholars (e.g., Ostrom et al. 1994), we scrutinized major economic and political interests held by external and domestic actors. We asked how these interests translate into constellations of power that impact the decisions and behaviors in peacebuilding processes at national and local levels. In this understanding, interest- and power-related behavior is based on a conscious, resource-based, and preference-maximizing logic (cf. Zelli 2011). Actors hold certain power positions based on economic, military, or political resources they have; and they use these resources to pursue their interests across different contexts, e.g., by pushing their economic or political weight in favor of certain environmentally and socially relevant decisions during peacebuilding.

Importantly thus, the two factors in the left box of Figure 1 are not fully ontologically or epistemologically compatible. Although the figure with its boxes and double-sided arrows reveals an epistemological grounding in constructivist perspectives on mutual constitution and contextuality, our analytical framework is theoretically eclectic. We chose this pragmatic and explorative path to allow for cross-fertilization among theoretical approaches and to do justice to the complexity of the peace-environment nexus (cf. Zelli et al. 2020).

Ultimately though, we did so to offer a common frame for, and benefit from, the diversity of disciplines and theoretical traditions of our project members and the further contributors to this special journal feature (cf. Campbell 1998, Ide et al. 2023). The cross-cutting insights we present in this synthesis article further benefit from a large methodical variety that the different authors applied to their respective in-depth case studies. This includes interviews with stakeholders and experts, qualitative analyses of key documents, legal positivist and policy analyses, ethnographical fieldwork, and spatial analysis (cf. Eklund and Dinc 2024, Magalhães Teixeira and Nicoson 2024, Nardi et al. 2024, Samper et al. 2024, Schulte to Bühne et al. 2024, Verweijen and Hoffmann 2024, Krause et al. 2025, Nardi and Kasznar 2025; Sjöstedt, unpublished manuscript, Valencia et al., unpublished manuscript).

Based on the two sets of drivers in our analytical framework, we addressed our other research questions about different types of environmental and social consequences and chances for sustainable peace, and how they hang together. For us this implies that social consequences can be causally linked not only to deeper narratives, discourses, or power constellations, but also to the degree (or lack thereof) of integration of environmental concerns into peacebuilding policies, and to the actual impact of the peacebuilding processes on the natural environment.

Making these connections is key to identifying intersectional links between environmental and social exploitation, which may be particularly virulent in intermediate states between conflict and peace. As Magalhães Teixeira and Nicoson (2024) put it, physical, structural, and cultural violence tend to go hand in hand at the intersections of gender, class, race, or ethnicity, with degraded natural environments and loss of land further reinforcing this detrimental connection.

Taking this one step further, we investigated how these connections between environmental and social consequences affect chances for achieving sustainable peace. Accordingly, we understand “sustainable peace” not only as the lasting absence of direct or physical violence, but also as continuously avoiding or mitigating structural and cultural forms of violence, i.e., discrimination against certain individuals or whole communities and their respective livelihoods. With this we go beyond a liberal or negative definition of peace (cf. Galtung 1969) and instead follow holistic and multi-dimensional understandings (e.g., Lederach 1997, Brantmeier 2018, Hsiao and Le Billon 2021).

We assume that the sequences and mutual constitutions between drivers and consequences of environmental peacebuilding can be analytically condensed into ideal-typical social-ecological trajectories with different chances for sustainable peace. We identify two such ideal-typical trajectories or generic causal routes. As we lay further lay out, the connections we found suggest a high plausibility of discursive or narrative-analytical perspectives, and we argue that these perspectives warrant more consideration in future studies on environmental peacebuilding processes.

Selection of case studies

In Colombia, the 2016 peace agreement ended 50 years of internal armed conflict during which over six million people were internally displaced (Gottwald 2016). At the same time, Colombia is recognized as a biologically megadiverse country with relatively low deforestation rates compared to other countries in South America. With the beginning of the peacebuilding process, large tracts of land and resources that were previously beyond the control of the state have become accessible again (Suarez et al. 2018). We chose the Sumapaz territory, the largest páramo (moorland) ecosystem complex in the world, as one of our particular research areas. The Sumapaz territory was once used by guerrillas as a hiding place and is now undergoing rapid transformations (Sierra et al. 2017). An additional research area is the Putumayo region, where we analyzed the increasing level of insecurity and violence in the wake of the peace agreement, as armed groups and drug trafficking cartels seek to fill the vacuum left by the FARC (Samper and Krause 2024).

In Uganda, our second case study country, the signing of the peace agreement in December 2002 had officially ended a three-decade internal armed conflict ravaging the north of the country (ACCS 2013). However, unceasing activities of the Lord Resistance’s Army (LRA) have continued environmental degradation and mismanagement until present, including biodiversity loss inside and outside protected areas (Nampindo et al. 2005, Osborne et al. 2018, Kaguta 2022). Colombia and Uganda thus present two cases with continuous social and environmental challenges since the official end of their respective civil wars. Yet, both countries differ regarding the timing of the peace agreement and, partly, the motivations behind sustained environmental degradation.

Apart from research on Colombia and Uganda, we draw on research conducted in other geographical areas and discuss commonalities and differences for environmental peacebuilding trajectories under varying temporal, social, cultural, and political conditions. These include the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo with the Virunga National Park, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, Tigray in Ethiopia, and selected areas in Brazil and Puerto Rico (Eklund and Dinc 2024, Magalhães Teixeira and Nicoson 2024, Schulte to Bühne et al. 2024, Verweijen and Hoffmann 2024).

Because of the diversity of cases we refer to, and the differences in the way they were studied, we refer to empirical findings in an explorative manner throughout the article. We use these results to identify certain elements and connections in the peacebuilding trajectories, but not in the form of a systematic and exhaustive case comparison for each step of the framework.

TRAJECTORIES OF ENVIRONMENTAL PEACEBUILDING

Each of the following sub-sections addresses one of the research questions above and the respective boxes in Figure 1. In addition, in the sub-sections on chances for sustainable peace and on underlying drivers, we discuss the various connections between environmental concerns, environmental and social consequences, overarching trajectories, and deeper drivers.

As we lay out in detail across these sub-sections, we see two major contributions of our research to the literature on environmental peacebuilding: first, the degree to which environmental concerns are integrated into peacebuilding processes has a major impact on the further trajectory of these processes, not only with regard to their environmental consequences, but also in terms of wider social consequences and the goal to reach sustainable peace. Second, and related to this, both sets of drivers we scrutinized matter greatly for orienting these trajectories, but it is particularly the impact of discourses and narratives that warrants further analysis.

The discrepancies across the various cases, in particular between Uganda and Colombia, demonstrate this crucial role of the initial integration of environmental concerns in a peacebuilding process. As we discuss in the following, nature and environment have been largely neglected or instrumentalized in the planning of the peace process in Uganda. In Colombia, environmental concerns have played a slightly larger role in peacebuilding, albeit in contestation to extractivist discourses, with respective implications for the environment, society, and chances for sustainable peace.

The environmental nature of peacebuilding processes

Environmental aspects play notably different roles in the peace processes we analyzed. One key and unique development in the Colombian case is the legal affirmation of the environment as a victim of the internal armed conflict (Sjöstedt, unpublished manuscript). This affirmation came largely from the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), which was established under the 2016 Final Peace Agreement. The JEP functions as a transitional justice tribunal and, thus, as an extrajudicial court system in the country. It investigates violations of human rights and crimes against humanity between 1990 and 2016 and involves ex-combatants, state agents, and civilians who took part in hostilities during the conflict (Ramírez Gutiérrez and Saavedra Eslava 2020). Importantly, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace has frequently incorporated local and indigenous knowledge and perceptions on the environment into its investigations and rulings. This includes notions of territory and the need to restore social-ecological relationships between both humans and non-humans (Sjöstedt, unpublished manuscript).

Concretely, the JEP declared the environment as a victim of the conflict in two early cases and thereby followed a tradition of previous court rulings. These cases concern the Atrato River, as ruled by Colombia’s Constitutional Court in 2016 and thus predating the peace agreement, and the Amazon in general, as ruled by the country’s Supreme Court in 2018. In fact, the integration of the natural environment in Colombia’s judicial and legal system ranges back to 2011, when the Law of Victims for Indigenous Communities introduced the notion of territory as a victim and thereby paved the way for the rulings that followed (Sjöstedt, unpublished manuscript). Other, more recent cases, have further extended legal subjectivity to rivers, national parks, páramos, and other ecosystems (Gómez-Betancur 2020).

These unique legal forms of environmental integration are contrasted, however, by a lack of clarity and considerable implementation and enforcement gaps at national and local levels. As for lack of clarity, the JEP did not elaborate on how the environment’s victim status can be compensated or how harmed territories can or shall be restored. Moreover, the inclusion of non-indigenous territories remains an open question, i.e., to what extent the right holders are limited to indigenous peoples and communities (Sjöstedt, unpublished manuscript).

Implementation and enforcement gaps at national and regional levels are recurring obstacles for including environmental aspects in Colombia’s peacebuilding efforts. As Sjöstedt (unpublished manuscript) stresses, there are concerns that compensation promises for victims may not be kept or fail to bring meaningful change on the ground. Valencia and colleagues (unpublished manuscript) show this for the Sumapaz region where local authorities and politicians have insufficiently referred to national instruments and state agencies that came out of the peace process. They name examples where Sumapaz officials only moderately engaged in JEP plans to use the region as a hub for coexistence between local inhabitants and former FARC combatants, e.g., through continued reparation activities by former FARC members in the territory. Likewise, various mayors of Sumapaz municipalities did not integrate public policies for these and other reconciliation activities into their local development plans (Valencia et al., unpublished manuscript).

One group that has been particularly affected by the lack of clarity and implementation of environmental elements of the Colombian peace process are environmental human rights defenders (EHRD). Since the peace agreement was signed these defenders have had a precarious role, stuck between abandonment and a certain recognition by the state institutions. Abandonment was particularly virulent under the administration of Colombia’s former president Iván Duque. Despite signing the Escazú Agreement in December of 2019, which obliged his administration to protect EHRD, Duque showed little initiative to avoid the agreement’s subsequent rejection in parliament. Moreover, Duque’s government did neither employ effective protection measures for EHRD nor a systematic pursuit of their attackers (Echeverry and Miller 2021).

As Krause and colleagues (2025) show, the inauguration of the current national government under President Petro in August 2022 has marked a significant change in rhetoric and decision making (Lombo 2022). Petro’s “total peace” policy connected the achievement of a sustainable peace in Colombia to addressing a series of global and domestic problems, including environmental degradation (Presidencia de la República de Colombia 2022). The latest National Development Plan explicitly refers to the protection of environmental leaders, and thereby acknowledges their demands in claiming land redistribution and land restitution. However, implementation gaps persist under the new government, especially in more remote regions of Colombia. As of early 2025 it still remains to be seen to what extent most of the Petro government’s ambitions can be realized on the ground (Idrovo and Quinn 2024).

Beyond these immediate challenges of clarity and implementation of key documents, court rulings, and state policies, there is a deeper problem inherent to the way in which environmental aspects have been addressed during the Colombian peace process. Although the peace agreement lacks a definition of territorial peace, Samper and colleagues (2024) stress that the agreement has a strong territorial focus nonetheless, beginning with the respective vocabulary used by the negotiating parties. They argue that this notion of territorial peace unravels a set of narratives that resurface in major documents and policies, reflecting instrumental and colonialist mindsets toward the environment and local livelihoods. We elaborate further on this notion below, where we discuss drivers of environmental peacebuilding.

The instrumental view on nature as a resource has been even more dominant and explicit in the Ugandan peace process. Nardi and Kasznar (2025) observe this in their analysis of all peace documents signed by the LRA and the government of Uganda and the country’s Peace, Reconstruction and Development Plan (PRDP) in its three completed phases between 2007 and 2021. The natural environment was only considered late in the peace-making process and, in the key peace documents and first two PRDP phases, was considered largely in terms of natural resources and services to be exploited and managed for sustainable (economic and social) development. In these documents, lack of economic growth is portrayed as one of the main drivers of the internal armed conflict.

For recent years, there is a certain shift in nature perspectives because of the eventual inclusion of resilience-strengthening (Nardi and Kasznar 2025). Still, in comparison to environmental peacebuilding in Colombia, the Ugandan peacebuilding processes lack an acknowledgement of the environment as a victim and a more encompassing recognition of environmental human rights defenders.

Eklund and Dinc (2024) see a similar growth logic at work in their study on the border areas of Syria, Turkey, and the Kurdistan region of Iraq. They find hydro-politics and energy transfer possibilities between the three countries as core issues of the environmental peacebuilding process. Other forms of environmental destruction, by contrast, such as vegetation fires and their impact on land have not received the same level of attention in peacebuilding efforts (Eklund and Dinc 2024).

Environmental consequences of environmental peacebuilding

In light of these dominant understandings and implementation and enforcement gaps, it is not surprising that the environmental consequences of post-conflict peacebuilding processes identified in the studies included in this special issue are largely negative. In Colombia, the lack of support for vulnerable communities by the Duque administration, but also the ongoing implementation challenges in remote rural areas after Petro took power, have facilitated environmental degradation. New forms of land grabbing, displacement of local populations, resource extraction, and illicit economies have emerged and solidified in the country (Counter 2019, Krause et al. 2022, Samper et al. 2024, Krause et al. 2025). As a result of these developments deforestation more than tripled in some regions in the Colombian Amazon because of the expansion of cattle ranching and coca growing (Agudelo-Hz et al. 2023, Murillo-Sandoval et al. 2023).

This trend in Colombia as a whole notwithstanding, Valencia and colleagues (unpublished manuscript) show a mixed picture for the Sumapaz territory since the beginning of the peace process. The high mountain ecosystems, and the páramo in particular, had been severely affected by decades of armed conflict because of direct damages by military operations (Moreno and Romero 2018, Angel Botero 2019), but also by impacts from related fires, land struggles, and displacements (Jara Gómez 2017). Unsustainable agricultural practices such as slash-and-burn, cattle ranching, high impact tillage, and extensive use of agro-chemicals, along with deficient disposal of solid and liquid waste were common in Sumapaz (Diazgranados and Castellanos Castro 2021). This led to deforestation, soil degradation, and erosion, as well as contamination and a reduction of water retention capacities (Valencia et al., unpublished manuscript).

Since the 2016 peace agreement, however, Valencia and colleagues (unpublished manuscript) find that local stakeholders perceive a general decrease in environmental damages in the páramo and a reduction in slash and burn and exploitation practices. Their analysis of deforestation patterns between 2001 and 2021 in the Cabrera and Sumapaz localities confirms this positive trend. With some temporal exceptions, deforestation rates have on balance declined substantially for both localities, particularly after 2016. This positive development is indeed counterintuitive to the abovementioned issues that local authorities in Sumapaz had with integrating major public policies and environmental protection measures coming out of the peace process.

In Uganda, the largely neoliberal and growth-oriented focus of the Ugandan peace process has facilitated considerable negative consequences for the natural environment. Northern Uganda has faced a series of environmental challenges since the 2002 peace agreement, most notably deforestation and degradation of native forest resources (Nyeko 2010). These developments have been driven by an expansion of plantation agriculture, oil exploration and exploitation, and urban growth, along with an increasing population in the region with subsequent higher demands on land, water, energy, and food resources. In some areas deforestation rates have accelerated compared to conflict times, when certain territories occupied by LRA rebels experienced even re-growth of vegetation cover because of limited access to local populations (Nardi and Runnström 2024, Nardi and Kasznar 2025).

For the Elgon region, for instance, spatial analysis shows a considerable loss in vegetation after 2002. The Elgon national park has been subject to recurring conflicts between local people’s usage of the area’s resources and conservation measures enforced by law (Nardi and Runnström 2024). This said, a positive case that stands out in Northern Uganda is the Karamoja sub-region where vegetation levels have increased since 2002. This development indeed goes back to a more long-sighted environmental peacebuilding initiative. In 2002, authorities decided to exclude about half of the Karamoja land from hitherto strict wildlife conservation rules, and instead returned that land to local communities, who started to cultivate crops and plant forest (Nardi and Runnström 2024). This example is remarkable because it not only shows a direct connection between environmental peacebuilding and positive environmental consequences, but also because different types of environmental benefits had to be weighed against each other.

In Tigray, Schulte to Bühne and colleagues (2024) find vegetation recovery in some areas since the start of the ongoing conflict. This is, however, not attributable to particular environmental measures, but to unintended environmental protection through inaccessibility, which resembles the situation in Northern Uganda during the conflict.

Such unintended exceptions notwithstanding, other areas in Tigray have largely suffered from severe vegetation declines. Based on open-source satellite imagery, Schulte to Bühne and colleagues (2024) find that areas of woody vegetation loss extend across 930 km². This equals circa 4% of the area occupied by forest and other woody vegetation in Tigray. They identify hotspots of vegetation loss mostly along major roads. Likewise, Eklund and Dinc (2024) identify several co-occurrences of conflict hotspots and fires, and, vice versa, of cold spots and low fire occurrences, in the Syria-Turkey-Iraq border area.

Social consequences of environmental peacebuilding

The aforementioned environmental consequences have direct implications for social aspects, in particular for the livelihoods of vulnerable groups, and are part of the trajectories or path dependencies we seek to identify across the various studies. One of the most severe social implications of environmental peacebuilding in Colombia regards the fate of environmental human rights defenders since 2016. The lack of clarity or implementation of protection measures for people defending the environment or social, indigenous, and human rights, exposed these defenders to an alarming increase of threats, violence, and assassinations across the country (Indepaz 2023, Global Witness 2024, United Nations General Assembly 2025).

This makes EHRD, and particularly those that belong to the more than hundred indigenous ethnicities and Afro-Colombian communities, the disproportionately most affected groups of the new wave of physical, social, and cultural violence since the peace agreement (Krause et al. 2025). The most frequent and deadly types of aggressions against environmental human rights defenders in Colombia are connected to land conflicts, mining, and illicit crops like coca (Global Witness 2021, Indepaz 2023). Some regions stand out in this negative trend, including the departments of Putumayo, Nariño, Chocó, Antioquia, Norte de Santander, Arauca, Caquetá, and Cauca (Krause et al. 2025).

Importantly, although violence against EHRD clearly predates the Colombian peace agreement, threats and assassinations of defenders have steadily increased across various Amazon countries over the last 20 years, with Colombia being repeatedly ranked the most dangerous country for them in the world (Krause et al. 2025; cf. Le Billon and Lujala 2020, Lynch et al. 2018). Also because of the insufficient integration of social-ecological concerns in the peace agreement under the Duque administration, a new surge of local conflicts, insecurities, and violence sweeps the Colombian countryside. By January 2025, the Colombian non-governmental organization Indepaz counted over 1700 killings of social leaders and human rights defenders in the country since the signing of the peace agreement in 2016 (Indepaz 2025).

For the Sumapaz territory, however, Valencia and colleagues (unpublished manuscript) reveal a differentiated picture, much in line with the mix of positive and negative environmental developments they observed since the peace agreement. Locals they interviewed refer to the start of peace negotiations in 2012 as a milestone that marked the beginnings of the transition to more peaceful times in the region (Valencia et al., unpublished manuscript). The subsequent demobilization of the FARC as the dominant armed group in Sumapaz had opened up safe spaces for new social leaderships to emerge, along with small businesses and farming activities. The further incorporation of former guerilla combatants into civilian and political life, including in municipal elections, led to a further normalization of this positive social development (Valencia et al., unpublished manuscript).

Some local interviewees in Sumapaz noted an increase in petty crimes and drug sales since the peace agreement though. They attributed this trend to the end of the de facto social control that the FARC had exercised in the area, and to the fact that these crimes were insufficiently followed up by local police authorities. Moreover, a stronger social cohesion still seems to be missing within and between various communities in the area, including former guerrillas and other local groups, who continue to mistrust one another (Valencia et al., unpublished manuscript).

For Northern Uganda we equally find that certain environmental consequences are linked to social challenges. Many communities in the region are still in a state of (latent) conflict because of continuous LRA activities. In fact, several areas experience the social-ecological implications of both the peacebuilding process and ongoing conflict in parallel. As we further discuss below among possible drivers of environmental peacebuilding, these two intertwined realities are largely informed by an extractivist view on the natural environment (Nardi et al. 2024, Nardi and Kasznar 2025). For instance, local communities in the Acholi sub-region stress that they keep struggling to reach a state of peace that is built on justice and reconciliation and that transcends views of economic growth and resource exploitation (cf. Lajul 2017).

The eastern DRC is equally marked by such a parallelism of conflict and peacebuilding, leading to uneven and unstable levels of security and livelihoods protection. As Verweijen and Hoffmann (2024) show, the emerging eco-tourism in the area only provided very limited trickle-down effects to improve the security of the local population. In fact, tourists are often the sole subjects of targeted protection measures, while local inhabitants are excluded from the security assets put in place to safeguard the Virunga National Park and its biodiversity (Marijnen 2022). As a result of this lack of protection, farmers in the area are regularly attacked and killed in their fields during harvest time (Verweijen and Hoffmann 2024). The eastern DRC is an example of how an instrumental approach to environmental peacebuilding leads directly to economistic and exclusive types of environmental use, with detrimental consequences for local people and livelihoods. We come back to this dominant narrative below when elaborating on drivers of environmental peacebuilding.

Schulte to Bühne and colleagues (2024) observe the close link between detrimental environmental and social consequences also for the ongoing conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region. As in Northern Uganda and several Colombian regions, this connection takes the form of an eroded capacity of social-ecological systems that impedes recovery from the visible and invisible damages of the conflict. The loss of human life and displacement of local populations have severely harmed the social, economic, and political structures that facilitated ecological restoration and social healing in the past. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and displacement of millions also eroded important local expertise and ecological knowledge, in some cases irreversibly, which undermines chances for encompassing environmental peacebuilding in Tigray in the future (Schulte to Bühne et al. 2024; cf. Boger et al. 2019).

Trajectories toward sustainable peace?

So far, and in accordance with our analytical framework, we have pointed at several correlations or outright connections between environmental mainstreaming, environmental consequences, and social consequences in peacebuilding processes. In the following we further expand this connection to the question of sustainable peace. We argue that the sequences and mutual constitutions between certain consequences can be analytically condensed into two ideal-typical social-ecological trajectories after internal armed conflicts that imply very different chances for sustainable peace.

On the one hand, where environmental concerns have been insufficiently integrated into peacebuilding efforts, be it in terms of neglect (for instance in Ugandan peace documents), or in terms of predominantly instrumental and extractivist perspectives (such as policies and measures taken by the former Duque administration in Colombia), we encountered adverse consequences for the natural environment in the form of deforestation and unsustainable resource exploitation. Moreover, we evidenced how the insufficient integration of environmental questions aspects causes multiple social consequences and undermines social cohesion and capacities, for instance the insufficient protection of environmental human rights defenders in various Colombian regions or lack of social trust within and between communities in the Sumapaz territory.

Taking this one step further, this trajectory does not stop at social injustice or mistrust but may lead to latent or virulent relapses into physical or structural violence, as both the assassinations of EHRD and the ongoing fighting in Northern Uganda exemplify. The Virunga case in DRC is marked by a similar pattern: the lack of a broader social-ecological concept has led to a deficient form of eco-tourism, which not only is directly linked to social inequalities in the region, but also to outright physical violence against local farmers (Marijnen 2022, Verweijen and Hoffmann 2024).

To summarize this trajectory: when environmental concerns are not sufficiently integrated in peacebuilding efforts, they can amount to detrimental environmental and social consequences that ultimately contradict peace by entrenching (new) physical, structural, and cultural violence. As we will further discuss, this trajectory is largely informed or driven by an instrumentalist perspective on nature, which dominates peacebuilding documents and policies. On a more fundamental level, it reflects a discursive or narrative lock-in, which, unless broken up, will keep resurfacing in old or new forms of social-ecological alienation and exploitation (cf. McNeish 2017).

On the other hand, and as an alternative trajectory, non-exploitative perspectives toward nature in local peace processes may enhance chances for sustainable peace. As Valencia and colleagues (unpublished manuscript) showed for Colombia’s Sumapaz region, moderate local implementation of social-ecological goals of the national peace process has partly turned around deforestation trends and improved social livelihoods in the region. The intertwined environmental and social consequences of the peacebuilding process in the area have brought about a feeling of sustainable peace among locals (Valencia et al., unpublished manuscript). Likewise, the analysis of the Sumapaz case has shown how the connection between these various factors can imply a certain fragility when certain aspects in the trajectory are changed. Notwithstanding some positive developments, the region still experiences continuous cases of land degradation, biodiversity loss, and social mistrust.

Given these differentiations and complex connections, we understand the two trajectories we sketched, from ways of mainstreaming the environment all the way to sustainable peace or relapse, as ideal-typical. They shall help put the differences we found in our studies in a more embedded and broader perspective. As we argue below, an overarching view on trajectories and their multiple connections can help understand why, for instance, people in some areas in Colombia have been able to enjoy a relatively stable period of tranquility compared to the time of war, whereas other parts have seen a resurgence of violence, with a growing number of criminal groups fighting over access to resources and land for growing and trading illicit products and minerals (Samper et al. 2024, Krause et al. 2025; Valencia et al., unpublished manuscript).

Drivers of environmental peacebuilding and its consequences: discursive lock-ins and power relations

How can we explain or understand these trajectories and the connections they make between different types of consequences? One of the two drivers we put under scrutiny can provide a plausible interpretation: the dominance of various narratives about the environment that amounts to a lock-in into an extractivist-instrumental discourse. Such a perspective on nature has recurringly materialized across the various studies and the different steps of peacebuilding they analyzed. It can help us understand one of the two trajectories, namely the one that exhibits a poor integration of environmental concerns into peacebuilding, leading all the way to a higher risk of relapsing into conflict. On the other hand, as the local study on the Sumapaz region could demonstrate (Valencia et al., unpublished manuscript), environmentalist counter-narratives are not always absent and may spur occasional developments toward more lasting peace.

Notably, as Nardi and colleagues (2024) show, extractivist views are not only prevalent in specific peacebuilding processes, but also in research on the nexus of peace and environment. In their overview, they identify instrumental perspectives on nature in terms of natural resources, while comparably little attention has been given, on balance, to alternative understandings. Based on the typology of values by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES 2022), Nardi and colleagues (2024) distinguish instrumental, intrinsic, and relational viewpoints. These roughly correspond to nature’s use for humans, nature’s value as such, and interactions between nature and humans, respectively. Nardi and colleagues (2024) conclude that, although instrumental perspectives have been dominant in the peace-environment literature since its beginnings in the early and mid-1990s (cf. Brock 1991), recent years have seen an increase in relational viewpoints.

Given these trends even in academic discussions, the dominance of instrumentalist perspectives in various peacebuilding processes, and the subsequent reproduction of the very conflict they seek to overcome, may come less as a surprise. This is exemplified by phrasings in key documents of the Ugandan peace process as shown above (Nardi and Kasznar 2025).

For Colombia, Samper and colleagues (2024) equally identified a dominant nature-instrumentalizing discourse. They caution against a historical reading of territory through a narrative of external actors and initiatives that bring civilization to remote areas and their local communities. This narrative has traditionally served as a justification for colonial projects throughout the country (Samper et al. 2024). Another narrative surrounding territorial peace is the idea of land ownership as the primary or only cause of armed conflict. This view distracts attention from alternative territorial struggles and expansionary attempts by large enterprises, the state, armed groups, and drug cartels (Cairo et al. 2018). Various formulas in the former Duque administration’s policy of “peace with legality” can be seen as grounded in these narratives. In a nutshell, Duque’s peacebuilding approach sought to pacify territories so they can be incorporated into a globalized economic growth model (Ahumada Beltrán 2020, Diaz et al. 2021, Van Dexter and Ingalls 2022).

Similar patterns are observed by Verweijen and Hoffmann (2024) for the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they see peacebuilding efforts as economistic and growth-oriented and entrenched in a “technomoral imaginery.” Much alike to the analysis by Samper and colleagues (2024) of territorial peace narratives for the Colombian case, Verweijen and Hoffmann (2024) see the peace process in Virunga presented as a civilizing mission. Combined with an optimistic take on the beneficial roles of external interveners, it is supposed to bring peace and help develop regions that are considered poor and more backward (cf. Aggestam and Sundell-Eklund 2014, Ide 2020, Krampe et al. 2021).

Based on their fieldwork in Brazil and Puerto Rico, Magalhães Teixeira and Nicoson (2024) find that very similar narratives underlie the paradigm of resilient peacebuilding. They argue that this paradigm is strongly based upon economistic premises, which legitimize the existence and reproduction of dominant global-capitalist structures and practices. These ultimately undermine long-term peacebuilding and give rise to risks of conflict and environmental disasters (Bliesemann de Guevara et al. 2023).

All this said, the ambiguous case of Sumapaz in Colombia also points out how counter-narratives toward stronger environmental integration may eventually alter a dominant trajectory. Although Valencia and colleagues (unpublished manuscript) document the slow implementation of key aspects of the national peace process in the region, and the negative environmental consequences thereof, they also point at countering developments. They describe how major social-ecological improvements, e.g., the reduction of slash-and burn practices or the incorporation of ex-combatants into social life, were mutually constituted with a growing perception of safety, peace, and normalization. This perception, in turn, may help us understand why local authorities, after some severe teething problems, eventually kept external investments at bay and employed more measures to protect the local environmental peacebuilding process.

Aside from narratives and overarching discourses, a second driver we put under scrutiny concerned more material and immediate types of power relations. We explored how interests from different types of actors (i.e., governmental, military, industrial, agricultural, communal, indigenous / national, local / internal, external) play out in key political institutions and processes of environmental peacebuilding. One could argue that these power relations are ultimately embedded in, and reproduced by, the aforementioned discursive lock-in into instrumentalizing nature. Nonetheless, we gave relations between actors particular analytical attention, as they can tell us more about direct and visible triggers in environmental peacebuilding trajectories.

For Colombia, key constellations of power involve the concentration of land ownership that was perpetuated beyond the peace agreement (Guereña 2017, Faguet et al. 2020) and the role of the state since the signing of Peace Agreement. These constellations further include large domestic and international companies that have been seeking control over mining and oil concessions as well as military, dissidents, and illegal actors (Potter 2020, Dest 2021, González-González et al. 2021). At least until the end of the Duque government in mid-2022, the government’s role and interests were severely impacted by some of these dominant forces. Duque pursued growth-oriented development programs, while neglecting protective measures for environment and livelihoods at the regional level, often culminating in the outright absence of state authority in more remote regions.

Samper and colleagues (2024) further point at an implicit involvement of various local authorities in illegal activities, which has forced people on site to either join illicit economies themselves or to leave their lands. In Putumayo, human rights defenders see a strong connection between, on one hand, governmental interests and two of the peace agreement’s development programs (on territorial focus [PDET] and substitution of illicit crops [PNIS]), and, on the other hand, a deteriorated economic and safety situation of families who have come to depend on cultivating such crops (Samper et al. 2024).

For the Sumapaz territory, Valencia and colleagues (unpublished manuscript) stress mining and megaprojects, e.g., on hydropower, hydrocarbons, and industrial agriculture, as major threats to the region’s ecosystems and the livelihoods of local and vulnerable groups (cf. Sepúlveda López and Sotelo Gaviria 2018). In their interviews, representatives of these groups voiced concerns that the interests of large companies and other external actors have led to an increased exploitation of the territory since the peace agreement (Valencia et al., unpublished manuscript).

This said, the Sumapaz case also exhibits positive developments toward more safety and environmental protection that can be attributed to shifts in local power constellations. This regards the high degree of social organization and mobilization of local farmers, which is linked to the tradition of agrarian struggles in the area (Valencia et al., unpublished manuscript). Over decades, recurring fights over land access, distribution, and protection have provoked the emergence and empowerment of a series of community-based peasant organizations. To a certain extent, these influential local groups have traditionally managed to keep external interest groups away from the area (Bautista-Gómez 2022).

Because of this particular power constellation and the exclusion of some external interests, environmental authorities were able to implement frequent controls in the Sumapaz area, further supported by the 2018 law to protect the páramo (Valencia et al., unpublished manuscript). Thus, efficient local social mobilization, ideally pre-dating the peace agreement, has made it easier to substitute for or facilitate governmental implementation that keeps lacking in other parts of the country. With this, they could largely prevent extractivist or illicit interventions in the Sumapaz territory.

Another aspect that facilitates social-ecological safety in the region is a shift in interest of the military. The end of the armed conflict in Sumapaz has converted the purpose of the High-Mountain Battalion on site from counter-insurgency to protecting and restoring the páramo (Valencia et al., unpublished manuscript; cf. Mendez Garzón and Valanszki 2022).

Altogether, power constellations largely mirror and materialize the broader narratives that are underlying environmental peacebuilding processes and their trajectories. These constellations are largely marked by a dominance of nature-exploiting interests, but, in some exceptional cases, may also advance community-based interests toward enhanced local sustainability and livelihoods. These local examples also point to chances for shifting to a more favorable trajectory. Although instrumentalist perspectives and associated power may perpetuate physical or structural violence, breaking up such lock-ins may open up new alleys for sustainable social-ecological peace.

CONCLUSIONS

Lessons learned: beyond the instrumentalist lock-in?

In this article, we synthesized different studies on environmental peacebuilding after intra-state conflicts that are united in this special issue. As an overarching result, we found major connections between key features and consequences of environmental peacebuilding processes, and how these connections may amount to overarching trajectories these processes may take. To understand these trajectories, we identified underlying instrumentalist narratives, and how they combine into a dominant discourse that undermines chances for sustainable peace. We further discussed power constellations in peacebuilding processes and how they can be interpreted as a materialization of these dominant narratives. This said, the role of environmentalist counter-narratives in the Colombian region of Sumapaz also showed the potential to shift toward an alternative trajectory toward sustainable peace.

Taking this potential into account, we discuss lessons learned from the various studies, in particular three factors we see that can facilitate such a shift: first, more holistic counter-narratives (e.g., on alternative territorialities, or multi-scalar, cross-dimensional, and transboundary approaches); second, a normative framework conducive to such narratives; and third, a stronger protection of actors who can spread such narratives.

Samper and colleagues (2024) see a discursive discontinuity as a chance for the peace process in Putumayo, but also for Colombia as a whole. They posit that alternative views on territory and nature that were historically silenced and destroyed may become relevant avenues for peacebuilding. In Colombia an overall thread is the need to address land rights and the promotion of alternative territorialities. These alternative territorial orders should ideally promote autonomy and local democratic processes, to resist the territorial configurations that new actor constellations of armed groups, the state, and corporations try to impose. Such alternative territorial orders could thus play a role in resisting an even further concentration of land through large-scale agro-industrial, illegal, and extractivist endeavors (Samper et al. 2024).

Findings from Uganda by Nardi and Kasznar (2025) show a similar need for a multi-scalar approach where relational and intrinsic values of nature are more in focus. The Ugandan case illustrates how the lack of environmentalist counter-narratives against the dominant instrumentalization of nature has put the peace process on a shaky trajectory. To bolster alternative narratives, local populations should receive more governmental support to safeguard and apply their local and traditional ecological knowledges, and to contribute these knowledges to concrete peacebuilding initiatives.

Apart from traditional knowledges, cross-dimensional and transboundary perspectives may also constitute holistic narratives that can facilitate a more peaceful trajectory. Research findings from the border region between Turkey, Syria, and the Kurdish Republic of Iraq (Eklund and Dinc 2024) document the need for transboundary management of vegetation fires. Authorities and governments need to collaborate across country borders to address fires as an increasingly severe driver of environmental degradation in the region, a driver that is strongly linked to conflicts between different ethnic groups and political factions.

The research on the Ethiopian region of Tigray by Schulte to Bühne and colleagues (2024) stresses the importance of cross-dimensional views for sustainable peacebuilding, e.g., by monitoring environmental health as a foundation for the well-being of local populations. According to the authors, previous experience from rebuilding institutions and structures that resulted in nature restoration should also inform any future peacebuilding and recovery strategies. Given the vulnerability of the region to climate change, such restoration of lost woody vegetation is crucial to support food security and livelihoods. Further inter-disciplinary research, drawing on satellite data combined with ground-based data collection, can make its own contribution to enhance such cross-dimensional, transboundary, and multi-scalar perspectives.

International environmental and human rights law can provide the normative frameworks that support or protect these counter-narratives. Such frameworks can ensure legal avenues in post-conflict states that help to reduce tensions and to break extractivist lock-ins. For this purpose, international and national law would need to be adapted and applied more strongly to local contexts. Colombia is a case in point, where the Special Jurisdiction for Peace was informed by progressive national jurisprudence that has granted nature rights since 2016. The JEP may be able to pave the way for an enhanced understanding of the legal approaches in the field of environmental peacebuilding (Sjöstedt, unpublished manuscript). In turn, this may raise chances for environmentalist narratives and discourses to play a strong role in the Colombian peace process.

Finally, these endeavors must be complemented with the legal, political, and direct protection of environmental human rights defenders, who can play a crucial role in spreading environmentalist norms and narratives. Their efforts are imperative to nurture a more sustainable peace that aims to restore social and ecological relationships (Krause et al. 2025). This is exemplified in the Sumapaz region where the tradition of local social organization and mobilization and strong socio-cultural ties to the ecosystems supported a relatively peaceful development (Valencia et al., unpublished manuscript).

Outlook and future research

In this article, we inquired to what extent peacebuilding initiatives and processes after internal armed conflicts are informed and shaped by key narratives and discourses and constellations of power. This notwithstanding, to date there is little systematic research on how these various factors influence peacebuilding (Gordon et al. 2020, Woroniecki et al. 2020, Vélez-Torres et al. 2022). Going beyond the explorative scope of our approach, there is a need for overarching case analyses that systematically test or apply theory-based assumptions on comparable empirical data. This goes for both objectivist and interpretivist theoretical perspectives in the social sciences, but also inter-disciplinary research designs that allow for broader theoretical and methodological cross-fertilization (Ide et al. 2023).

On a more specific note, our findings suggest a stronger research agenda on the diverse understandings and values of nature in peacebuilding. Such an agenda would be in line with recent work from the IPBES on the valuation of nature (IPBES 2022, Nardi et al. 2024). Respective research projects could make a conscious effort to reject the mainstream instrumental take on nature and study the positive implications of a more holistic approach to environmental peacebuilding (Nardi et al. 2024).

Furthermore, crucial insights can be gained by researching the differences between post-conflict societies and societies that have not experienced recent internal armed conflicts. Do these societies differ in how they value nature and pursue environmental sustainability? To what extent does the peacebuilding process constitute windows of opportunity for a fresh start toward a sustainable and just transition, windows that may not be that open in other types of societies? Or, do post-conflict societies have much worse starting conditions for achieving environmental sustainability?

Finally, not only the peacebuilding processes but also the scholarly approaches that study them may benefit from more holistic or critical research perspectives. There are various holistic concepts or lenses that warrant such an application. One of these is the notion of climate-resilient peace that brings together human and environmental well-being by addressing imbalanced power and resources. The normative objective of this concept is to foster transformative processes in which intersectional peace can be experienced in the context of a changing climate, whereas the conditions of this peace do not contribute to climate change (Magalhães Teixeira and Nicoson 2024). To bring environment and peace into such a positive dialectic relationship, a peace agenda needs to address both social and environmental issues in parallel, while transforming structures that (re-)produce violence.

A similar holistic concept is the peace ecology paradigm, which draws attention to systemic issues that lead to environmental degradation during conflict (cf. Nardi et al. 2024). The paradigm combines notions of bioregionalism, place, and interconnectedness to arrive at effective environmental peace-making strategies. Normatively put, by embracing principles of peace ecology, narrow and instrumentalist short-term environmental cooperation may potentially be superseded by more interconnected measures and sustainable solutions for both peace and the environment. Peace ecology, just like democracy, requires thinking beyond set borders. This implies not only conceiving of one single territorially defined “demos” or body of citizens, but of a diversity of partly overlapping political subjects and identities, including ecological ones (Anderson 2012).

With regard to employing more critical perspectives, researchers need to continue being self-reflective about the knowledge production in the growing environmental peacebuilding community, and to understand and question dominant narratives that may impact their own perspective. Furthermore, environmental peacebuilding research would benefit from the integration of analytical approaches that have testified to more self-reflexivity on the politics of knowledge production in relation to the Global South, the moral imperative to intervene, and the socially constructed nature of human-environment interactions (Magalhães Teixeira and Nicoson 2024, Nardi et al. 2024).

A stronger engagement with political ecology may also help to repoliticize the study of how natural resources governance relates to and transforms conflict dynamics. Critical environmental peacebuilding scholars have warned against the dangers of depoliticization. However, they have often centered these warnings on addressing political relations and inequalities within sites of intervention, while conceptualizing the intervening actors as external (e.g., Ide 2020, Krampe et al. 2021). For instance, Ide (2020:7) proposes “environmental and social impact assessments, external monitoring (e.g., by international media or donor agencies), national laws against discrimination or (not properly compensated) relocation, inclusive consultation processes, and mainstreaming gender and conflict sensitivity.” Here, the key to depoliticization remains firmly encapsulated within project interventions and external interveners.

In light of our finding of dominant and overarching instrumentalist narratives however, we argue that more encompassing critical analyses of environmental peacebuilding should leave behind such an internal-external distinction. A genuine repoliticization requires thinking through how environmental peacebuilding interventions may themselves be inscribed in a global political economy of conflict, knowledge production, aid interventions, and natural resource governance. For future alleys of research on this topic, this implies looking at global supply chains and related structural violence, the unequal global distribution of the burdens of pollution, environmental degradation, and climate change.

Likewise, such a perspective calls for analyses of the broader instrumentalist governance functions and effects that environmental peacebuilding interventions may have, be it intendedly or non-intendedly (e.g., Büscher 2013, Selby 2013, Aggestam and Sundell 2014). Altogether, such self-respective, holistic, or critical research programs may help identify important conditions for shifting toward sustainable trajectories of environmental peacebuilding.

__________

^[1] https://natureofpeace.blogg.lu.se. The program consisted of consecutive projects that involved over 15 researchers over a six-year period, their disciplinary backgrounds being inter alia environmental law, human geography, international law, physical geography, political science, and sustainability studies.
^[2] https://www.environmentalpeacebuilding.org.

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